Patterns of folk embroidery from Poland

What some of you might already know, I love to stitch in my free time. It feels amazingly relaxing to see the patterns coming to life. I collect various materials about traditional Polish folk embroidery; recently I decided to reorganize them and came upon an idea of creating a set of patterns which I could share with you.

Personally, I love the cross-stitch technique and therefore chose examples of Polish embroidery in this particular technique for the set of patterns, with a few examples which can be transcribed into the cross-stitch.

I’m adding a few patterns below for a start, and have much more just waiting to be reedited and prepared for publishing here. This is a growing collection and this article will be definitely updated many times. If you’d like to use some other Polish patterns in your projects, make sure to visit this article again in the future to check whether something new appeared at the bottom.

Those of you who want to learn more about Polish folk costumes I can invite to take a look at the educational gallery I run at polishcostumes.tumblr.com (with a growing list of regional Polish folk costumes). Each pattern below is described with a name of a place in Poland it comes from, and the name links to a proper tag in the gallery in order to show you the traditional costumes from the region and to give you an idea of how the embroidery is used in them.

Side note: if you’re going to share or use the patterns, all I’m asking for is to link back to my blog ♥ Please do not crop the images in any way!

Włodawa is a small town on Polish-Belarusian border, located quite close to a point where Polish, Belarusian and Ukrainian borders meet together.

For this pattern I used a photo of old embroidery made in a different technique, but wanted to convert this motif into a cross-stitch project. Here’s the original piece I used as reference, found in patternsofeurope.pl:

It’s based on a few various patterns, and the rows of the motifs can be used separately or mixed in a different order. I based the patterns on archival photos found in the book “Strój opoczyński / Atlas Polskich Strojów Ludowych”, 1956. I changed the pattern with flowers slightly, on the basis of other similar examples from Opoczno:

My blog tells about the mysteries of the Polish folklore, customs and mythology, with a strong focus on those elements where the old 'pagan' beliefs were carried on. To read more, please check my 'about' page.

Feel free to leave a comment, and to ask questions or request more informations about a certain topic.

For asks or informations about quotation of my articles, please send me a message to lamusdworski [at] gmail [dot] com.